Searching for documents or other digital works may be achieved by identifying documents that contain a word or words present in a search term. Indexes containing a subset of keywords from documents may also be created. Instead of scanning entire documents, the keywords in the indexes may be compared to the search term words or phrases. When a match is found the document associated with or linked to the index may be returned as the search results. This may reduce the computational time and resources used in the search.
Certain documents may be restricted or sensitive requiring a level of control or security. Such security measures may include securing a particular database or digital storage to restrict access to authorised users or systems. The particular documents may also be encrypted to prevent access or analysis without a decryption key.
However, such security measures make it difficult to carry out effective searches for such documents. For example, accessing a secure database may be difficult or not possible. Scanning encrypted documents for particular search terms or words may first require decryption of the subject information. In any case, allowing access in these ways may introduce undesirable security flaws, which may compromise the data.
Therefore, there is required a system and method that overcomes these problems.